Good Books by Funny Women!

By Contributor Barbara Holm


I love books so much that, when I was a kid, the only thing I wanted more than “to be a Monty Python” (Source: Me, Age ten) was to work at a bookstore. Funny books are usually my favorite, because I am a human and humans like laughing. Here are just a few of my favorite books by women in comedy:

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Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling

A few weeks ago someone asked me what my favorite book was, and I said it was this one without hesitation. My friend said, "That doesn’t count because your favorite book is always the last book you’ve read." However, I have since read a few books and this is still my favorite! It's a charming collection of essays ranging stylistically from true-life memoir stories to adorable anecdotes and lists.

I identified with a lot of the awkward stories of her childhood and was inspired by her work ethic. My favorite part was when she discussed writing the Off-Broadway play Matt and Ben, which turned out to be the door that led to The Office. I think this chapter humbly downplays how talented, creative, and driven she and her friend were to write, produce, direct, promote and star in a comedy play. Mindy writes, “Because no one would hire us to act or write, Brenda and I decided to create something to perform in ourselves.” It also showed me that if you have a dream (for example, to write for TV), don't wait for the dream job to fall in your lap, start working at it now, because if you don't, it might never happen.

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Bossypants by Tina Fey 

I've read a few books about SNL and a many that were autobiographies of comedians, but few that were this laugh out loud funny, thoughtful and charismatic. The different stories weave together to depict the amazing life of a woman who is passionate, ambitious, strong and hilarious.

My favorite part of the book was the chapter "I don't care if you like it." The story is about Jimmy Fallon telling Amy Poehler one of her jokes wasn't "cute," and she said, "I don't fucking care if you like it." Fey says this embodies her outlook on sexism in comedy: If old, unfunny men tell the media that women aren't funny, she doesn’t care if they like it. Fey writes, "Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on." It’s wonderful advice for anyone (not just women) in an artistic profession.

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I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I've Dated by Julie Klausner 

This dating memoir cracked me up, and I'm usually bored by dating memoirs. The stories are as ridiculous, loud and funny as Julie Klausner herself. While I don't take everything she preaches as gospel, I love the main theme of the book. Throughout so many dating horror stories, Klausner consistently insists that women should be confident, strong and not bend to a man's wishes. She encourages against girls who infantalize themselves for men, and girls like Miss Piggy who beg and plead for an indifferent Kermit. It’s a fast, funny read calling on women to unabashedly be themselves. (Klausner is a WICF alumna).

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I Totally Meant to Do That by Jane Borden 

I had the pleasure of meeting Jane Borden (a Women in Comedy Festival alumna!) a few times, and I always thought she was genuinely kind and I really liked her. When her book came out, my admiration grew into: “holy crap this girl is funny and awesome.” The book is a collection of memoir-style stories about a southern girl moving to New York. It’s hilarious and well written, with a distinct voice. “I totally meant to do that” is charming and quirky and reminds me of David Sedaris, or a happier Augusten Burroughs.

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The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman

I didn't expect this book to affect me the way it did. Sarah's stand-up is slightly impersonal, fiction-based and relies on a character. So when I picked up her book to casually browse through it, I was surprised when a full hour later I was fully engrossed and so touched I was fighting back tears. While hilarious, the memoir is nakedly sincere and honest, employing a courage that many comedy books lack. I loved learning about her early forays into stand-up and was impressed with the way she threw herself wholeheartedly into the craft at a young age. One part I liked was the chapter "Make it a treat," where Sarah says if something is incredibly special she tries not to overuse it, which is a strategy I then applied to my own comedy writing.

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All of these books are wonderful and changed my life in tiny ways through giving me comedy or life advice. I think it’s important as an artist to read as much as possible, to fill oneself with creative input. More than anything, reading all these hilarious books by women just inspires me to one day hope to write my own.



Barbara Holm is a stand-up comedian from Seattle, Washington. She has performed at Bridgetown Comedy Festival, The Women in Comedy Festival, and Bumbershoot Festival. She has been described as clever, creative and unique.

Bossypants

So, Friday night I did a bad thing.

I was teasing Jesse, and I didn't realize that I was being kind of a colossal dick.

I sometimes forget that people don't like it when you call them names...

I'm an awful person.

So, Jesse, I apologize. I know I already did, but I wanted to say, one more time, that I'm sorry for being a dick.

Meanwhile, across town.

 I finished Bossypants. Tina Fey's memoir.

 

Usually I'm not a huge fan of memoirs and autobiographies and the like, but I'm a huge fan of Tina Fey. So I got Bossypants, and I loved it.

It's funny, and real, and sometimes crass. It was great.

Of course, I may be biased. I love pretty much everything Tina Fey does. I love her show, 30 Rock.

I still think it was a really good book though. It made me laugh a lot.

Review: Tina Fey's 'Bossypants'

By WICF Contributor Meghan O'Keefe

Tina Fey's new book!

It’s the book many of us have been waiting for: Tina Fey’s Bossypants. It’s the first book by Saturday Night Live's first female head writer and it’s a compelling look inside what makes one of the most successful comediennes in history tick. But enough with the bombast and set-up, is Bossypants any good?

Yes. It’s very good. It’s an amusing and fast read. Is it as good as the critics and fans are saying? I honestly wasn’t as impressed with Fey’s prose writing style as I thought I would be. Then again, as an English major, I tend to be more judgmental than the average reader. Also, I don’t know why people are saying it’s “laugh out loud funny.” People are claiming that they broke into hysterics while reading it. Maybe I’ve just been jaded by a year of New York City open mics, but I found most of the humor to be reliant on sarcasm and that’s tricky to pull off in print. Also, she plays a lot of games with “fake names” for people which I personally didn’t find that funny. Still, these critiques are highly subjective and based on my own personal tastes.

I absolutely loved all the tiny details she included about her time at Second City, Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. I loved hearing about how her Second City touring group rebelled and wrote their own material, or how Cheri Oteri was turned down for a part in favor of Chris Kattan in drag, or finding out which writers wrote which specific jokes for 30 Rock. On a personal note, I can’t tell you how surreal it is to read about her time on the road with Ali Farahnakian while you’re waiting on line for Shake Shack and then to head over to the P.I.T. for your Level 3 Grad Show, only to see Ali walk by you in the theater bar. I almost wanted to pull the book out of my purse and cry, “You’re in this book I’m reading!” But I restrained myself because a part of me still wants to be taken seriously.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton.

As you guys may or may have surmised, I’m an improv/Saturday Night Live/comedy writing nerd, so seeing the entire Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton cold open in print (with the last minute dress rehearsal edits handwritten in the margins) was amazing. I almost wish the book was just stories about how sketches were written. So, I wish there was more comedy nerd stuff. That said, I also kind of feel like if it’s supposed to be a memoir—which there’s debate about whether or not it is—then there should have been more personal stuff.

Here’s the tricky thing about Tina Fey as a writer, comic and public personality: she refuses to be vulnerable. “Oh, but Meghan,” you protest, “she shares embarrassing photos from her childhood! She cracks jokes about her acne! She’s so self-deprecating! She talks about her grooming habits!” The thing about that is Fey’s self-deprecation about her looks has become something like armor for her. She’s tread that ground so many times, it’s not like she’s really revealing anything terribly painful. It’s like in a recent episode of Glee (I can’t believe I'm referencing Glee here, but the specific moment hits the nail on the head), where Rachel sings this overwrought original song about being raised without a mother and Finn calls her out on using “easy pain” for her art. His point was that even though it sucks that Rachel didn’t have a mother, Rachel is comfortable exposing this pain. She’s not really risking her heart and soul by revealing the dark stuff she keeps buried. No matter how much we, the audience, want to know what inspires Fey’s art and what haunts her soul, we’re never going to find out.

Tina Fey at a book signing.

In a weird way, by refusing to reveal awkward, painful or personal details, Fey reveals a lot about her personality. Fey’s humor has always been based on wit and intellectual strength. She thinks people who air their dirty laundry (or even have dirty laundry) are worthy of scorn. She uses peoples’ interest in how she got her scar as a litmus test for their morality. Her deepest wish is that she can instill a sense of shame in her daughter the way her father did for her. She’s not going to tell us why she loves comedy. She’s not going to reveal what specific childhood trauma being on stage addresses for her. She’s not going to spill the cutesy details of how she and Jeff Richmond fell in love. That’s private. That’s not for us to see.

What’s strange is that she ends up revealing less about her personal life in her “memoir” than she does in talk show interviews. She plays this weird game trying to hide the names of her husband and daughter, when we already know numerous hilarious anecdotes about them from the press. Take the story she has told about how she re-furnished her entire apartment when she learned Oprah was coming over. Her daughter, Alice, immediately brought Oprah over to a bowl of wax pears and said, “These crazy bananas are for you.” I can’t stop thinking about that story when I think about Bossypants. Just as she changed her entire apartment for the arrival of a famous guest, Fey seems to have tidied up her life story so it’s suitable for public presentation. It’s a great presentation, but the huge gaps in the story let us know it’s not the full truth. But she put so much effort into making it all fit into a breezy, quippy narrative, that it’s rather charming. These crazy bananas, fellow readers, are for us.

Is there anything that really disappoints me? Well, I was personally rubbed the wrong way by how emphatically she states that most of her success can be owed to having a strong father figure. I know it’s a very personal reaction, though. My father passed away when I was little and I was raised by a single mother, and so I get kind of incensed when smart people suggest the only way to raise a successful adult is to have a male influence. It certainly helps, but stuff happens. People adapt. You can have a strong father figure and still turn out messed up. Like I said, though, that’s a personal quibble.

As you may or may not be aware, a few months ago I wrote a weird essay about Tina Fey and about my expectations for this book. Essentially, certain chapters of Bossypants were being leaked through The New Yorker, and because I am small and vain and like attention, I felt like I deserved to voice my opinion on certain quotes that I was reading completely out of context. Now that I’ve read these passages in the context of the complete work, I do think that I lot of my anxiety about Fey’s “not-so-feminist-sounding” feminism has been tempered. Between her fawning over Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Cheri Oteri, Kay Cannon, Amy Ozols and childhood friend, Maureen, it becomes clear that Fey loves supporting strong ladies. She even seems to believe her greatest achievement as Head Writer at Saturday Night Live was ushering in a more lady-friendly environment. She says that by the time she left Saturday Night Live, women were frequently working together in ensemble sketches and rarely delegated to thankless girlfriend roles. Fey deserves to be proud of this, but the sticky thing there is that there haven’t been too many female ensemble sketches since she and Amy Poehler left. The only thing I would say there is that it’s a reminder that even though trailblazing women have fought for my generation to have an easier time of things, we can’t take these accomplishments for granted. It’s a constant fight. We’re still far away from a time when we can just assume that women will get equal billing, respect and rights just because other women were able to get it. And as Fey constantly points out, the best way to accomplish this is for ladies to work together as opposed to cross purposes.

If you haven’t read Bossypants yet, you definitely should. It answers a lot about Tina Fey and her work, and raises a lot of new and interesting questions. Most of all, it's inspiring to follow Fey through her career. It's a definite must-read for any woman in comedy. After all, she put together these crazy bananas just for us.

Meghan O'Keefe is a comedian in NYC. She has a blog about herself called "Meghan O'Keefe" and a blog about how her mom watches Game of Thrones called "My Mom Watches Game of Thrones".

My Trouble With Tina

By WICF Contributor Meghan O'Keefe

Little, Brown & Co.

I’m beginning to get very worried about reading Tina Fey’s Bossypants.

The more and more I hear about Tina Fey’s personal opinions about feminism and comedy writing, the more I get weird knots in my stomach. As I get older, I’m finding myself disagreeing more and more with her and as someone who’s primary comedic (and life) influence is Tina Fey, that’s slightly worrying.

Let me back up. I should start by saying that Tina Fey literally changed my life. Before Tina Fey was on Weekend Update, I had a very specific understanding of what a nerdy, quiet brunette who wore glasses and wrote for her high school newspaper could accomplish in life. I was a good girl. I was a smart girl. I was probably going to be a journalist, teacher or book editor. It would be a good life, but one that was based upon honoring rules to a fault. Because I’m a good girl, breaking rules scares me. Order provides security and security provides happiness. When Tina Fey shot to national recognition as the first female head writer of “Saturday Night Live” and co-anchor of Weekend Update, it was as though a huge door had opened for me in my life. A smart girl who loved playing by the rules could bend those rules if she was smart, hard-working and funny. I had had a breakthrough moment like that before. When I was young, I saw Jennifer Saunders ride an airport luggage conveyor belt in an episode of “Absolutely Fabulous.” Something clicked back then in my head: You could break the rules if you were doing it for a laugh. I was a geeky girl in Delaware, though. I couldn’t look at the foreign and fabulous Saunders and see myself in her. But when I read an article about Tina Fey and discovered that she grew up less than a thirty-minute drive away from me and was editor of her high school newspaper as well, I finally felt a kinship with a female comedian. It wasn’t crazy for me to want to be funny; it was natural. I started writing comedy and performing improv. By expressing myself through those art forms, I finally found an inner confidence I’d always lacked and forged friendships with true kindred spirits. Every happiness I have now in life I owe in some respect to comedy, and I owe comedy to Tina Fey.

Meghan, once she became
comfortable as a comedian.

The danger with having one person inspire you to pursue a craft is that you tend to think they are the end-all be-all when it comes to how to approach that art form. In high school, I tried to write poetry like Emily Dickinson and short stories like Katherine Mansfield. I still find myself approaching satire with a Fey-like bite. Somehow, I was lucky enough to know early on I could never be exactly like Tina Fey. She had stated several times that she felt safer and more confident in glasses; I feel more self-assured wearing contacts. That sounds like a really dumb and superficial difference, but it created a crack between how I saw myself and how I saw myself relating to Fey. I knew I would never, ever be exactly like her. I still look at my sketch writing and notice it might be hindered by trying to evoke Fey’s sharpness too much. My sense of humor is deeply rooted in the same mesh of silly and smart that she brings every week to “30 Rock.” However, my voice as a stand up and my opinions as a woman seem very different from Fey.

Maybe the reason I’m worried about what her opinions on feminism and comedy writing are is because she is undoubtedly one of the few women whose opinions on those subjects are widely respected. Fey currently stands as the most successful and, at least, most visible, female comedy writer in America. Her opinion does matter, and because there isn’t another woman who’s obtained her level of notoriety to enter the argument, that opinion becomes fact. Everyone defers to her because, frankly, there’s no one else to defer to. So when, as a young woman and aspiring comedy writer, I find myself disagreeing with a lot of her opinions on womanhood and comedy writing, it puts me on uncomfortable ground. If someone who’s older and wiser has certain opinions on subjects based on life experience, then I, as a neophyte, should certainly defer to them. Right?

Meghan O'Keefe!

Wrong. If Tina Fey has taught me anything, it’s that it’s important to have faith that your point of view as a female comedy writer is important because it’s different from a man’s. Going further, it’s even more important if my point of view as a female comedy writer is different from other female comedy writers, because that means that the diversity of female voices in comedy is equal to the diversity of male voices in comedy. You can’t tell me that Larry David and Adam McKay and Louis CK and Dave Chappelle all approach humor with the same perspective. If they did, comedy would be incredibly boring. The best comedians respect other as writers and performers. They try to learn from each other, but they stay true to what makes them unique. Likewise, female writers should strive to learn from Fey’s example, but also work to step out of her shadow. The biggest thing I’ve learned from Fey’s career is that you need to approach your comedy writing with discipline and intelligence. Unlike Fey, I think sharks and robots are really funny and slut-shaming is kind of in poor taste.

Tina Fey will never stop influencing my work. Even last week, three of the four articles I had published online* referenced Fey in some capacity. As role models go, she’s pretty amazing. So far, she has managed to balance life as a wife and mother while pioneering a new role for women in comedy. I’m really lucky to have someone like her to look up to, but that looking up to someone doesn’t mean that we always have to see eye-to-eye.

Oh, and I’m still probably going to read Bossypants and obsess over it.

*I wrote a review of "30 Rock," an essay about Mean Girls (and Clueless), and Fey came up in an interview I did with Jessi Klein.


Reblogged with permission from Meghan's Tumblr, "Meghan is Okay. Just Okay. It's Cool." Meghan O'Keefe is a comedian in NYC.

Woman-Helmed Comedy Leads 'Comedy Awards' Noms

By WICF Editor Liz McKeon


The new Comedy Awards, which will be taped on March 26th in NY's Hammerstein Ballroom, and aired on April 10th across Viacom properties Comedy Central, Spike TV, TV Land, VH1, Logo, CMT, and Nick at Nite, announced the first-ever nominations today, according to Variety.

"30 Rock" carried the day with seven nominations, with Comedy Actress — TV noms for Tina Fey and Jane Krakowski, and Comedy Actor — TV noms for Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan, as well as noms in the Writing, Directing, and Comedy Series categories, all three of which pit it against "The Office."

Tina Fey at this year's SAG Awards.
Photo courtesy of JustJared.com.

Tina Fey was also nominated in the Comedy Actress — Film category for Date Night.

According to Jon Weisman at Variety, the nominations were chosen by a board which included James Burrows, Stephen Colbert, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Brad Grey, Seth MacFarlane, Adam McKay, Conan O'Brien, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Chris Rock, Ray Romano, Phil Rosenthal, Jon Stewart and Lily Tomlin.

Jane Lynch ("Glee"), Betty White ("Hot In Cleveland"), and Kristen Wiig ("Saturday Night Live") all got acting nods, as did Anne Hathaway (Love & Other Drugs), Dame Helen Mirren (Red), Chloë Moretz (Kick-Ass), and Emma Stone (Easy A). Both Stone's and Moretz's films are up for Best Comedy Film, Screenplay, and Film Director awards, as well. This means that Jane Goldman, along with Matthew Vaughn, is up for Best Sceenplay (Kick-Ass).

Adult Swim's "Childrens Hospital," which stars Erinn Hayes, Megan Mullally, and creator Rob Corddry, is up for the Sketch Comedy/Alternative Comedy Series category, as is Wiig's "Saturday Night Live."

Whitney Cummings' special, "Money Shot," was nominated in the Stand-Up Special category. Comedy It Girl Lena Dunham was nominated for her screenplay for Tiny Furniture.

My Mother, the Comedian: A Life, with Kids, in Comedy

By WICF Contributor Rachel Klein


"Confessions of a Juggler," Tina Fey's article on working moms in the entertainment world and the rude questions which are so often posed to them, has touched off a storm of words within the blogosphere. WICF contributor Rachel Klein has her own compelling take on being a mom, being a comedian, and putting together the puzzle pieces of a life onstage. "Confessions of a Juggler," Tina Fey, The New Yorker, February 14 & 21, 2011, pp. 64-67.

Let’s get this out of the way right from the start: I am done having children. Contrary to what some people who clearly just got out of a time machine from the 1950s ask, I’m not interested in “trying one more time for a boy.” I don’t miss nursing, or changing diapers, or waking up every two hours in the middle of the night to feed a human being the secretions of my own body. When all of my friends are finally sending their kids of to their first days of kindergarten, I’ll be dropping mine off at college, and I can’t freaking wait. I also don’t regret having children when I was twenty-four, or getting married when I was twenty-two. I love my husband. I love my kids. Plus they’re always saying awesome stuff like, “Harry Potter is basically just Luke Skywalker, right?” and “I hope Nicholas Cage’s daughter appreciates what he went through to bring her that bunny!” And there’s something else: I don’t regret the time I took off from comedy, because it was those life experiences that I had in the intervening years that have given me my unique comedic perspective.

It’s a little strange, feeling like the people I perform with every day are very much my peers, and yet so disconnected from one of the most important parts of my life experience. And it goes both ways. When my twenty-something friends ask for dating advice, I tell them the seemingly shocking truth that I literally never dated as an adult, and so, were I to give them advice, I’d probably just try to recall what Rachel did in a “Friends” episode or something. They, for their part, don’t know what it’s like to have to negotiate nights out with your husband, since any night you are gone at rehearsal, or a show, or “team bonding” is a night that you are asking him to stay home with the children—or pay $60 for a babysitter to do it. I once had the members of my improv team in Chicago literally chip in five bucks each so that I would stay another few hours with them at the bar when I complained about how much the babysitter was going to cost. Being a wife and mother in comedy is not really living two different lives; it’s cramming the commitments, relationships, and ambitions of two lives into one life-sausage. And sometimes it’s a tight squeeze.

Rachel and her beautiful girls

A few years ago I was coaching a high school improv team. One night we had particularly low numbers at rehearsal, and no one had let me know beforehand they’d be out. I launched into a tirade about how every moment I was choosing to be with them was a moment I was spending away from my children. That I was okay with making that choice if I knew the time would be well spent, but that I wasn’t going to tolerate them just blowing me off because they were watching “Gossip Girl” and couldn’t be bothered to make it out to rehearsal. The next week the student leaders made a reminder notice with a picture of my kids (that they’d found on my blog) and the copy: “What are you doing Wednesday night? Spending it with your children? Ms. Klein isn’t. Feel the guilt.”

Everyone showed up.

But, I will say this: there is something about the crystalline clarity that the life I live provides. Because every choice carries with it such a clear set of options, and because every moment I’m choosing one thing I love I’m actively choosing to spend time away from something else I love. I make my choices wisely. I don’t have time to not love what I’m doing, and whom I’m doing it with.

That’s led me to create a Harold team at ImprovBoston, Maxitor, consisting of like-minded performers with passions and empathies that match their talents. When I choose each week to spend time rehearsing and performing with them, it feels like the right choice. It’s time away from my family, but it’s time that enriches my life, and I bring that feeling back home. One of my favorite questions I get asked by my sleepy kids when I come home from a show is, “Were you funny?” Of course, my other favorite question they ask at those times is, “Why do you smell like pine trees?” (The answers to those questions, of course, are “yes” and “gin”, respectively.)

Of course, the reality is that there are a lot of great opportunities I pass up because they would just push too far into the time I’ve already set aside to be with family. And the opportunities I do take on beyond my regularly-scheduled rehearsals and performances have to be carefully chosen and planned for. When I choose to go to an improv festival, I have to plan for my children to have playdates, for their lessons to be rescheduled, and for all this to happen without my husband feeling overwhelmed by a weekend of single parenting. And my experience at that festival, or show, or rehearsal, is heightened by my understanding of all of the sacrifices and rearrangements and compromises that went into making it possible. Of course, it’s also heightened by the all-night rager involving way too many people crammed into my hotel room until way too early in the morning, drinking PBRs chilled in the bathroom sink — but that’s a different kind of heightening.

Really, though, what I’m talking about is a feeling I think anyone who pursues a life in comedy feels. As my friend and teammate Natalie Baseman recently said to a group of students for whom we performed at a local school when they asked us why we seemed to be having so much fun onstage, “None of us get paid to do what we do, so we have to do it because we love it.” Comedy, like any art form, is a labor of love. Sort of like being a mom.

Rachel Klein began in comedy in college, performing with The University of Chicago's Off Off Campus. After a fi ve year getting-married/baby-making hiatus, she returned to the stage at the Second City Conservatory and with the Harold team Chopper at the iO theater in Chicago. She joined ImprovBoston when she moved to Boston in 2008, and currently coaches and performs with t he Harold team Maxitor. She was in the cast of the popular ImprovBoston showcase show This I mprovised Life, and has directed and performed in several other groups and shows in the Boston area. She also teaches improv at ImprovBoston and Gann Academy, where she teaches English. Rachel blogs about the comedy that is motherhood at accidentalfeminist.com, and her comedy writing has been featured on the popular humor website McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Girls Behaving Badly: Burlesque

The first in the "Girls Behaving Badly" blog series by Sheila Moeschen

A vintage burlesque poster

Burlesque. It’s a term that conjures up images of blue-lit cabaret stages where women adorned in sequins and pasties, pranced, danced, teased, and tantalized boozy execs (think Mad Men’s Roger Sterling, wearing that maddening, boyish smirk as he swirls his scotch and gazes on the shimmying hips and legs before him.)  Burlesque is sexual revolution! It’s counter-culture! It’s comedy! What now?

Before Burlesque became parlance for strip-tease light, it was a distinctive comic form, largely driven by women.  Burlesque arrived in America in the 1860s via a sassy English lassie named Lydia Thompson along with her troupe of fair-haired female performers known as the British Blondes.   The girls performed wearing *gasp * short skirts, similar to those worn by ballerinas.

Lydia Thompson

But the British Blondes were no statuesque, elegantly limbed ballerinas pretending to look bored and uninterested holding poses that defy the muscular logic of the human body. They were, as one critic put it, “clog dancing creatures,” who wore “nude” or flesh-colored tights, padded to emphasize their legs and curves.  They were proud of their “yellow” hair, dyed to call attention to their artificiality, and heavily rouged faces. (Yeah. How original are you now, Lady Gaga, hm?)  And yes, the British Blondes danced, pranced, teased, and, most importantly, made audiences laugh with their bawdy, bold humor.

In its purest form, Burlesque involves parody and satire.  It can take the form of songs, speeches, or entire plays.  Burlesque typically inverts, distorts, and exaggerates form and content, possibly to critique social or political ideas, but most certainly to make people laugh.  Flash-forward to a gangly, wide-eyed comedienne from the 1970s named Carol Burnett, trying to sashay gracefully down a winding staircase wearing drapes complete with curtain rod and gaudy tassels.  Her brilliant parody of the legendary film, Gone with the Wind, in a sketch titled “Went With the Wind,” skewers this beloved classic and the reverence fans and critics hold for it in the matter of several minutes of hilarious physical comedy.  

One hundred years prior, Thompson and countless other female troupes were laying the ground work for a style of comedy that put women at the visual and verbal center of some of the funniest, sassiest, and most inventive Burlesques written.  Think all-female casts performing Romeo and Juliet, only Romeo is the son of a Governor who sings a song about wanting to sell his coffee plantation and strike down the Townsend Tariff.  Trust me, in the 1860s this would have brought the house down with its hilarity and hip satirical wit.

Nineteenth-century Burlesque ushered in a comic revolution for women who, prior to this time period, were not viewed as comic performers.  Popular opinion held that women, due to their delicate natures (this is the same sex equipped to go through child birth, delicate my ass!) were unequipped to understand comedy.

Burlesque marshaled in a new way for women to gain visibility and economic empowerment on the stage. It also caused quite a stir, dividing male critics who, essentially, didn’t want their wives to find out how much they enjoyed watching Thompson riff on popular culture in tights and with *gasp again! * her shoulders exposed.  Many critics published articles in the news about how Burlesque meant the erosion of common decency and morals for “serious” (i.e. women forced into dramatic roles because dickhead theatre managers thought they had their sense of humor lobotomized) actresses.  Others saw Burlesque as the end to legitimate drama itself.  There was a lot of What Would Shakespeare Think type of self-righteous finger wagging in these articles.  However, the nature of such a vitriolic response, combined with the popularity and lucrative nature of Burlesque highlights what has remained common throughout much of America’s history: women who claim their rightful places in the world of men make the culture nervous.  This is why Burlesque and its traditions of parody and satire have been and remain so crucial to our legions of funny women.  It enables Tina Fey to expose Sarah Palin for the homespun cliché that she is or for Tracy Ullman to take down the Hollywood cult of beauty and self-important posturing in her satirical homage to Renee Zellwegger.  Or for Gilda Radner to celebrate and take apart the female punk rocker icon with her hilarious and fierce Candy Slice character. 

For more than a century, Burlesque’s legacy has given comediennes a seat at the political and social tables, helping them to hone their comic shops and use their voices.  Of course, pasties don’t hurt either.

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Woman in comedy Sheila Moeschen has a PhD in Theatre & Drama from Northwestern University with a Minor in Gender Studies. She puts theory into practice as an improv and sketch comedienne in Boston, MA.